(or Why does anyone think this is funny?)
Consider the following case:
On Twin Earth, a brain in a vat is at the wheel of a runaway trolley. There are only two options that the brain can take: the right side of the fork in the track or the left side of the fork. There is no way in sight of derailing or stopping the trolley and the brain is aware of this, for the brain knows trolleys. The brain is causally hooked up to the trolley such that the brain can determine the course which the trolley will take.
On the right side of the track there is a single railroad worker, Jones,who will definitely be killed if the brain steers the trolley to the right. If the railman on the right lives, he will go on to kill five men for the sake of killing them, but in doing so will inadvertently save the lives of thirty orphans (one of the five men he will kill is planning to destroy a bridge that the orphan's bus will be crossing later that night). One of the orphans that will be killed would have grown up to become a tyrant who would make good utilitarian men do bad things. Another of the orphans would grow up to become G.E.M. Anscombe, while a third would invent the pop-top can.
If the brain in the vat chooses the left side of the track, the trolley will definitely hit and kill a railman on the left side of the track, "Leftie" and will hit and destroy ten beating hearts on the track that could (and would) have been transplanted into ten patients in the local hospital that will die without donor hearts. These are the only hearts available, and the brain is aware of this, for the brain knows hearts. If the railman on the left side of the track lives, he too will kill five men, in fact the same five that the railman on the right would kill. However, "Leftie" will kill the five as an unintended consequence of saving ten men: he will inadvertently kill the five men rushing the ten hearts to the local hospital for transplantation. A further result of "Leftie's" act would be that the busload of orphans will be spared. Among the five men killed by "Leftie" are both the man responsible for putting the brain at the controls of the trolley, and the author of this example. If the ten hearts and "Leftie" are killed by the trolley, the ten prospective heart-transplant patients will die and their kidneys will be used to save the lives of twenty kidney-transplant patients, one of whom will grow up to cure cancer, and one of whom will grow up to be Hitler. There are other kidneys and dialysis machines available, however the brain does not know kidneys, and this is not a factor.
Assume that the brain's choice, whatever it turns out to be, will serve as an example to other brains-in-vats and so the effects of his decision will be amplified. Also assume that if the brain chooses the right side of the fork, an unjust war free of war crimes will ensue, while if the brain chooses the left fork, a just war fraught with war crimes will result. Furthermore, there is an intermittently active Cartesian demon deceiving the brain in such a manner that the brain is never sure if it is being deceived.
QUESTION: What should the brain do?
[ALTERNATIVE EXAMPLE: Same as above, except the brain has
had a commisurotomy,
and the left half of the brain is a consequentialist
and the right side is an absolutist.]
Copyright, 1988 by the American Philosophical Association
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Twin
Earth--First used by Hilary Putnam in The Meaning of Meaning was
an example in an argument for the claim that microscopic differences in
macroscopically indistinguishable substances or objects would change the
meanings of our words. In the article, Putnam argues that on Twin Earth
what looks like water to us earthers is really composed of xyz, not H20.
Thus, if we were transported to Twin Earth, all of our judgments about
xyz would seem like true judgments about water to us, while they would,
of course, be false judgments about xyz. This is a partly a response to
Russellian Descriptivism and nomialism as an account of the meanings of
our terms.![]()
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The
Brain in the Vat--A modern, 1950's science-run-amok movie-style updating
of Descartes's Demon. The Brain in the Vat
scenario is a thought experiment designed to show the plausibility of radical
skepticism. If we were merely Brains in Vats, hooked to computers which
send the same sorts of electrical impulses that a normal body would have,
we would have experiences indistinguishable from "real life"
experiences with no hope of discovering our predicament. Thus, it is possible,
according to those who find this example compelling, that radical skepticsm,
the thesis that we have no certain knowledge, is true. The Brain in a Vat
scenario was responded to by Hilary Putnam to promote his version of the
argument for the claim that radical skepticism has to be false. He uses
a version of the private language argument to argue that a brain in a vat
would have no true beliefs. A brain in a vat which was causally hooked
up to receive the same inputs it would have received if it had been in
a body would, ex hypothesi the radical skeptic's theory, believe
the same things we believe. But it would have no public referent for its
words and sentences, and hence couldn't have any human language, since
on Putnam's view, all languages require public referents. Thus, he argues
that the skeptic who thinks all of our belief are (or could be) false has
to suppose that we are like brains in vats. But since brains in vats could
not have a language, and we do...
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Knows--Judith Jarvis Thomson's article
which revived the trolley problem, Killing, Letting Die and the Trolley
Problem, has the word 'knows' italicized when she stipulates that the
driver of the trolley has but two choices. He or she cannot derail or stop
the trolley, Thomson writes, and the driver knows this because the driver
knows trolleys. A feature I just obsessed about and overused
to great comedic effect in the article, wouldn't you agree? The nonphilosophers
who stole my piece didn't understand my inside joke, but had the presence
of mind and enough exposure to mass media to pick up on the overuse of
'knows' and make a Bo Jackson joke. Ha ha ha. How subtle. Maybe we could
slip in a McDonald's reference next time.
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Jones--Jones is the standard name for the hapless
"average person" in all philosphical examples since the days
of those wild boys at Cambridge (Bertie
Russell, G.E. Moore and Alfred North White-Westinghouse). Jones? That's
the most original thing they could come up with? Geez, a bunch of real
creative geniuses, those guys...![]()
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G.E.M. Anscombe--Ms. Anscombe is a very famous
British Moral Philosopher. You know, yesterday I saw a bumper sticker that
read "The Moral Majority is Neither." Clever, huh?
I wonder why that just occurred to me...
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Pop-top Cans--Aren't
they neat? Especially the new big mouth ones? God,
I love technology. ![]()
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This
bit of the example again owes much to Judith Jarvis Thomson's Killing,
Letting Die and the Trolley Problem. She was the philosopher who came
up with the analogous case called the transplant problem. In this problem,
you have to decide whether you would sacrifice a person whose organs could
be passed around to save the lives of five people about to die. As certain
as most people are that they would steer the trolley onto the one person
to save the five, they are even more sure that they should not sacrifice
the one to save the five in the surgery case. This asymmetry in people's
responses has spawned a huge effort to analyze what moral differences there
are, if any, between the two cases. I think Jonathan
Bennett settles this dispute in his Killing and Letting Die
and his book Events and Their Names. ![]()
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Unintended Consequences--Anyone familiar
with the Catholic Church and their influence on Moral Philosophy will know
that this is a reference to their Doctrine of Double Effect, the
doctrine that it is permissible to do absolutely anything at all to anyone
you want to so long as no one can make you stop. No wait! That's their
Doctrine of Everyday Life. The Doctrine of Double Effect
is the doctrine that an agent is not culpable for the unintended but foreseen
consequences of morally permissible actions, even if these consequences
are immoral or impermissible. This doctrine often comes up in discussions
of the bombing of civilian targets during war. In other words, if any of
what I have said on these pages offends you, that's too bad. I
didn't intend to offend you, but just to edify, so I'm in the clear!![]()
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Hitler--You're kidding, right? You
don't know who Hitler was? Look it up! ![]()
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Just War Theory--St.
Augustine was one of the first philosophers to spend a lot of time
and mental energy arguing that there could be just wars, providing certain
rather strict conditions were met. Other philosophers since his time have
carried on the project and spent even more time thinking about which wars
were just and which were not. Go figure. ![]()
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Amplification of effect--Eventually,
every utilitarian author worth his or her salt has to face some form of
the desert island example. Opponents of utilitarianism never fail to point
out that if a utilitarian were on a desert island with no possibility of
ever being rescued or found out, almost any course of action would be permissible,
given the right circumstances. I guess they watched too much "Gilligan's
Island" growing up. Anyway, the argument is supposed to be that
all forms of reprehensible behavior is kept in check, according to the
utilitarian calculations, only because it would be bad (i.e., it would
cause more unhappiness than pleasure) if the bad actions were discovered.
On a desert island, the threat of discovery would be gone and we utilitarians
would run wild like the kids in Lord of the Flies. Therefore, I built
in to my account the claim that all other brains-in-vats would behave exactly
as this brain did, to forestall the whining of anti-utilitarians. So there.
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Cartesian
Demon--A being imagined by Rene
Descartes in his ultra-influential Meditations on First Philosophy.
Descartes is interested in making sure all of his beliefs are worthy of
belief, so he decides to suspend judgment on all beliefs about which he
cannot be absolutely certain. To help him make sure he doesn't hold onto
any doubtful beliefs, he theorizes that there is an omnipotent being whose
main objective is to fool him about everything. Descartes decides that
such a being could fool him into being mistaken about every belief save
one--that he exists. This is the source of the famous dictum Cogito,
ergo sum.![]()
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Commisurotomy--An
operation (pay attention, this is exactly brain surgery we're talking
about here) in which the neurons and connective tissue between the left
and right hemispheres (or right and left, depending on which way you're
facing) of the brain are cut, so that no direct communication occurs between
the sides of the brain. This procedure was mainly performed upon people
with epilepsy to lessen the severity of their seizures, but the results
have started a nice little cottage industry for philosophers called Cognitive
Science. The effects of the commisurotomy are rather astounding when explored,
all the more so since they do not manifest themselves outside of laboratory
conditions. One of the most amazing things you will discover when researching
this topic is how likely people were to let doctors fool around with their
brains in the 1950s and 60s. There must not have been enough lawyers back
then. Two good sources for further reading are Charles Marks's fine book
Commissurotomy, Consciousness and Unity of Mind, and Thomas Nagel's
essay Brain Bisection and the Unity of Consciousness.![]()
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Consequentialist--A consequentialist
is a moral theorist who thinks that the rightness or wrongness of an action
depends on the consequences of the action, rather than the category the
action falls under, the agent's intention, or any other feature of the
action. Utilitarianism is a well known form of consequentialism
(espoused by Bentham,
Mill and others) according to which the amount of happiness an act produces
is the relevant consequence.![]()
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Absolutist--An absolutist is a moral theorist
who thinks that some actions are categorically right in such a way that
they are never overridable. Immanuel Kant is a famous absolutist moralist
(as is G.E.M. Anscombe) who famously
thought it was never permissible to tell a lie, no matter how trivial,
in order to acheive a good, no matter how great. ![]()
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